Shipping records show a steady stream of North Korean coal shipments to Vietnam's Cam Pha port, from where the fuel is likely re-exported in violation of UN sanctions[read the article at www.atimes.com]

One doesn't have to look far to discover that the North Koreans have arrived in Yangon. And for the foreseeable future, kimchi is not likely to be the only thing that North Korea exports to Myanmar. [read the article at www.irrawaddy.org]

The growing uncertainty among North Korea's trade partners in the middle east could explain why the country is now cementing ties with a client much closer to home: military-run Myanmar. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

Military-run Myanmar's growing weapons ambitions threaten to destabilize the region and make the Southeast Asian country a new global weapons proliferation hotspot. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

North Korea's succession plan may appear farcical, but its newly-developed deadly wares are no joke - nor is the fact that countries are willing to trade in military equipment with North Korea and Iran despite UN Security Council sanctions. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

The nature of military co-operation between North Korea and Myanmar has come under international scrutiny amid fears of nuclear proliferation activities. Bertil Lintner investigates the historical ties and extent of collaboration between the two pariah regimes.[more]

In this second part of the series on North Korea's clandestine economy, Bertil Lintner describes the demise of many North Korean-owned restaurants in Asia due to the economic crisis - restaurants which were operated as money-laundering fronts.[read the article at yaleglobal.yale.edu]

Bertil Lintner reveals how North Korea has been secretly helping Burma - another pariah regime - to build an extensive tunnel network as emergency shelter and for other unknown purposes.[read the article at yaleglobal.yale.edu]

North Korean Premier Kim Yong-il is scheduled to pay a four-day visit to Cambodia in early November, underscoring the curious close relationship between one of the world's last communist dictatorships and one of Asia's most ancient monarchies.[read the article at www.atimes.com]

It has been known since the early 1990s that North Korea exports manpower to eastern Russian logging sites. But two remarkable incidents over the past years reveal that the foreign-currency-strapped nation also sends laborers to other, somewhat less expected places in the world. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

A key step in the solution to the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula may be in sight as the North Korean Foreign Ministry said on Monday that it is ready to shut down the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon as soon as its funds in a Macau bank have been released. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

The state of North Korea's information-technology (IT) industry has been a matter of conjecture ever since "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il famously asked then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address during her visit to the country in October 2000. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

North Korea may in the end get its US$25 million, which has been frozen in a Macau bank since September 2005. But the United States and North Korea still have a long way to go before relations between the two countries can be normalized. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

While the West and Japan have targeted North Korea's overseas bank accounts to curtail its weapons program, Pyongyang has recently turned to more ingenious ways of maintaining its international businesses through substantial exports of gold, silver and other valuable metals. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

In mid-October, North Koreans Kim He-shim, Kim Su-ok, Lee He-yong and Lee Chol-yong crossed the Mekong River and landed somewhere near northernmost Thailand's river port of city of Chiang Saen. They were certainly not the first, nor the youngest, nor probably the last North Korean refugees to make the 5,000-kilometer-plus trip from North Korea to Thailand. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

North Korea's "Great Leader", Kim Il-sung, was obsessed with nuclear weapons even before the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed on September 9, 1948. Bertil Lintner examines this ongoing obsession. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

While the rest of the world was anxiously following news about North Korea's recent missile tests, Kim Jong-il's second son and possible heir apparent, Kim Jong-chul, had his mind focused on entirely different matters. He was among the fans who followed British rock and blues guitarist Eric Clapton on his German tour, which took him to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Leipzig and Berlin. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

Under perceived threats from the US, Myanmar and North Korea are strengthening their strategic ties in a military-to-military exchange that includes weapons sales, technology transfer and underground tunneling expertise. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

North Korea may be a poor country, but it has some of the most developed missile systems in the world. Not even years of near-economic collapse, famine and hunger have hampered the country's missile-development programs, which are meant both as a preemptive defense - to scare off potential attackers - and for export. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

North Korean capitalism is thriving - just not inside North Korea. Pyongyang has steadily established a string of legitimate and less legitimate front companies across East and Southeast Asia, aimed at earning the cash-strapped government badly needed hard currency. And, as Bertil Lintner finds out, business is booming. [read the article at www.atimes.com]

It's got shopping, advertising, trading companies and new
incentives to make profits. Despite North Korea's many problems, the
small changes seen in Pyongyang now could be the first steps towards a
market-oriented economy.
[more]

With an estimated forty per cent of North Korea's foreign exchange earning coming from weapons sales-of which missile export is a major part-halting their sale is not only good for global stability but for curbing North Korea's nuclear program as well. [read the article at yaleglobal.yale.edu]

Bertil Lintner reviews this true story of a group of "independent commandos" from Britain's Royal Marines who operated under United States command behind enemy lines in North Korea in the 1950s. [more]

When Slovakian police raided a luxury apartment in Bratislava the occupants had fled. But a trove of documents left behind by the North Korean couple who lived there indicated that they were missile-trade agents for their country. [more]

Since 1982, the North Koreans have had their own bank in Austria's capital, Vienna. It's called the Golden Star Bank and is 100% owned by the Korea Daesong Bank, a state enterprise headquartered in Pyongyang. Bertil Lintner reports. [more]

As the global war against terrorism gains momentum, East Asia's most reclusive state faces some hard decisions: Will it continue to sell ballistic missiles, illegal arms and contraband or will it clean up its act? [more]

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